I Married a Communist

"It’s Roth most melodramatic novel, written with flamboyance. I like I Married a Communist a great deal because of its energy. Every page has a revelation. It is a captivating book. It’s a novel about politics. The main character in the novel is Ira Ringold. Ira’s brother Murray is a teacher, who’s based on an actual teacher named Robert Lowenstein that Roth had in high school, and what he went through when he was accused during the McCarthy era. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In I Married a Communist, the characters confront constant challenges to their identity. There is the constant theme of impersonation. Ira begins his career imitating Abraham Lincoln. He gives great performances of the Gettysburg Address, which leads to a radio career which leads to his relationship with a woman who herself impersonates someone else. It’s also a novel about acting. Ringold’s love interest is a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, an actress known by the name Eve Frame, who is actually Chava Fromkin. It’s a novel about uncovering who people really are and showing that you cannot hide from who you really are. Impersonation never really succeeds. And we have to say that I Married a Communist was one way Roth got back at Claire Bloom. She had recently published Leaving a Doll’s House , a one-sided account of her relationship with Roth, which infuriated him. So, he creates an actress prone to hysterics and deception. In his mind, she deserved it! It is a tangled topic. People say that even though he represented women as sexual objects and misrepresented or mistreated women, he had mutual relationships with many women in his real life. But critiques of Roth’s representation of women are largely correct. His treatment of women in his work is generally unsympathetic. It is focused on the physical and sexual. Naturally, people react strongly to it—not just in today’s climate, but even when these books were first published. It’s a question, I suppose, of how harmful it is and whether it is enough to undermine Roth’s strengths as a writer unafraid of addressing contemporary problems. “One of his editors told me that he rarely earned back his advances” There are many Roths. There is the misogynistic Roth and then there is the lyrical Roth. Roth isn’t thought of as a lyrical writer because few pay attention to his writing about nature. He loved nature and spent a lot of his life in the countryside: see the final page of The Human Stain , a marvelous piece of writing. This is another aspect of Roth. It’s hard to give up on a writer with this multiplicity. Sabbath’s Theater stands alongside Portnoy’s Complaint as one of Roth’s most controversial books. The protagonist, to be blunt, is a ‘son of a bitch.’ Yet Roth told David Remnick he felt the freest and happiest as an author when writing Sabbath’s Theater because he could let go again. He’s back in the world of Portnoy’s Complaint , but now with a sixty-something protagonist who is almost unlikeable. Mickey Sabbath’s body is giving out. He’s unpleasant. He’s overweight. But he has an insatiable desire and appetite for physicality, even though death is catching up to him. Yet, in Sabbath’s Theater, there’s a marvelous lyrical moment at the end. Sabbath is on the shore in Roth’s native New Jersey, wrapped in an American flag that was given to his mother when his brother died in World War II. That ending is equal to Fitzgerald’s end for The Great Gatsby . It’s a lyrical moment given to a revolting main character. Attention. Offending is a way to avoid being ignored. He was determined to make others listen to what he had to say. And he found much to offend him almost every day. Measured by sales? His two bestsellers were Portnoy’s Complaint and The Plot Against America . Other books got a tremendous amount of press, but one of his editors told me that he rarely earned back his advances. I don’t think that was his goal. I think his goal was to write about issues and circumstances that upset him. The ideas of political correctness, for example."